Stay at home with kids for a year or become CEO?

Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch recently declared that moms who take time off to stay at home with their children don’t have a chance at becoming CEOs when they return to work.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. “There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

Moms: Do you think Welch has a point or do you want to throw tomatoes at him?

Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if “you’re not there in the clutch.”

“The women who have reached the top of Archer Daniels, of DuPont, I know these women. They’ve had pretty straight careers,” he said in an interview with journalist Claire Shipman, before thousands of HR specialists.

“We’d love to have more women moving up faster,” Mr. Welch said. “But they’ve got to make the tough choices and know the consequences of each one.”

Taking time off for family “can offer a nice life,” Mr. Welch said, “but the chances of going to the top on that path” are smaller. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice career,” he added.

Whether Welch makes a valid point is a matter of debate. You might agree that women must choose between the corner office and staying at home for a year with a new baby. Or maybe you think it’s possible for a new mom to slow down her career for a few years, and then return to the work place, highly motivated and energized to break the ceiling.

But what seems clearly apparent in Welch’s words is the assumption that women are of less value if they choose to spend extra time with a new baby. I might be overly sensitive as a working mom, but I feel Welch implies that climbing to the top of the corporate ladder is more honorable than raising a family and having a “nice” life. He suggests that women are giving something up by opting to stay at home for a few extra months or years, or to work a flex schedule. When women have children, isn’t what they’re gaining of more importance than what they might be giving up, if they’re even giving up anything at all? Plus, women who get to spend lots of time with their kids and have a career (whether it’s in a low-level, mid-level or executive position) might see their situation as the best of both worlds and the ultimate accomplishment.

And is anyone bothered that Welch is speaking only to women? What about men? It’s becoming more common for men to take extra time off to be with a new baby or to skip Fridays in the office to coach Little League. Does a time-out from work hinder men the same way Welch says it does women?